SXSW Film Reviews
Low Self-Esteem Girl amounts to nothing terribly special, which makes its Jury Award for Best Narrative Feature all the more baffling.
By Barry Johnson, Fri., March 16, 2001
Low Self-Esteem Girl
D: Blaine Thurier; with Corrina Hammond, Rob McBeth, Ted Dave, Cindy Wolfe. (Video, 96 min.)Lois (aka low self-esteem girl) seems not so much unconfident as she does dim. Easily manipulated and, well, just plain easy, she's a nice girl who does everything in earnest, like earnestly joining a religious cult and earnestly inviting total strangers in just 'cause they're holding cute puppy dogs. Low Self-Esteem Girl is kinda funny, but in the way your friends are funny. (Would people pay to watch your friends for 90 minutes?) Canadian director/writer Thurier gets a nod for constructing a laughably weird plot, but there's not really much here to excite. I freely own up to a bias against video (I think it almost uniformly looks like crap), and Low Self-Esteem Girl doesn't do anything to change my mind. Add to that a truly lame last-minute stab at female empowerment, and Low Self-Esteem Girl amounts to nothing terribly special, which makes its Jury Award for Best Narrative Feature all the more baffling. (Bad Dog, 3/16, 3:30pm)
